Who Should Run LA's Public Schools? - LA Progressive

Who Should Run LA's Public Schools? - LA Progressive:

Who Should Run LA’s Public Schools?

 

ver a decade ago, when there was a push to break off the vast San Fernando Valley from the Los Angeles Unified School District, and for the Valley to form its own school district, I was not in agreement. However, with approximately 675,000 students in the seven district areas that comprise LAUSD, I find I am now changing my mind, as have many of us who are education professionals and follow and write about public education.

This huge LAUSD enterprise, with a yearly budget of over $7 billion, has been mired in confusion, corruption, and inefficiency for many decades, and seems not to be manageable.

This huge LAUSD enterprise, with a yearly budget of over $7 billion, has been mired in confusion, corruption, and inefficiency for many decades, and seems not to be manageable. I tend to now agree with some Angelinos who are pushing to reconstruct LAUSD into multiple independent districts. The danger, however, is that it would further segregate the inner city students.

Right now, the multitude of charter schools (LA has the most in the nation) that pick and choose among students of color—leaving behind those who are hard to teach, English Language Learners, or are personally handicapped and have special needs—have contributed to almost total re-segregation of students of color despite the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education.

Also, it would be very costly to have all these new districts with a multitude of administrators. One of the greatest economic problems at LAUSD is the nepotism that for so many years has caused the abundance of hiring many unnecessary middle managers whose large salaries are now built into the budget and who do little to deserve this taxpayer largesse.

Many lifelong Los Angeles residents—and particularly those of us who are also professional educators—are beleaguered by the lack of input allowed the public by the district, lack of transparency of the district and the Board of Education, and the system of highly financed candidates who get elected to the BoE, who either are not educators, or also are not skilled in business management.

We do not need more ‘Voteria’-impacted (paying for votes through an illegal lottery), multi-Who Should Run LA's Public Schools? - LA Progressive:

Why Sen. Bernie Sanders Wins as the Education Candidate

Why Sen. Bernie Sanders Wins as the Education Candidate:

Why Sen. Bernie Sanders Wins as the Education Candidate

Last night during the democratic debate, like always, there was no mention of K-12 education, so why did Sen. Bernie Sanders win the debate as the education candidate?

It’s simple. Sen. Sanders’ argument against the power and influence of big corporations has huge implications in regard to public schools.

It would be nice if he spoke more about K-12, but how could Sen. Sanders use such anti-corporate rhetoric for the basis of his campaign and not realize how corporations currently influence public schools?

Consider Teach for America, which, on their 25th anniversary is being excitedly praised at Education Week. This is the same news source for educators that  receives grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

TFA has chipped away at the real teaching profession for years–since politicians and some corporate leaders decided public schools would be better run like a business. They create a group of faux teachers pitted against career teachers who get honest teaching Why Sen. Bernie Sanders Wins as the Education Candidate:

CURMUDGUCATION: Cheap or Excellent??

CURMUDGUCATION: Cheap or Excellent??:

Cheap or Excellent??

So I'm on twitter, "discussing" this piece by Eric Hanushek. (I air-quote "discussion" not because of any qualities of the people involved, but because nobody can wax eloquent with depth and nuance at 140 characters a shot).

The piece belongs to the genre I think of as Befuddled Mysteries of Failure, in which reformsters scratch their heads at how reformy ideas have not worked. Hanushek's meditation on the intractability of the "achievement gap" (I air-quote "achievement gap" because it's a euphemism for "standardized test score gap") ends in typical bemusement.

Vastly more jarring is that the central goal of the report—the development of an education system that provides equal educational opportunity for all groups, and especially for racial minorities—has not been attained. Achievement gaps remain nearly as large as they were when Coleman and his team put pen to paper, even when better research has suggested ways to close them and even when policies have been promulgated that supposedly are explicitly designed to eliminate them.

"When Coleman and his team put pen to paper" is fifty years ago. But I tweeted that the mystery of why we hadn't yet closed the gap -- well, here, read for yourself the exchange that followed

And a whole bunch of people just loved that response. Liked it, retweeted it. And I realized, watching the retweets pile up, how tired I am of this particular argument.

Because it always starts with talking about the achievement gap and the non-wealthy, non-white students who are being denied as good an education as the burbians get, but then it ends up with insistence that we fix this problem on the cheap.

How could it possibly be cheap? Seriously-- we're talking, particularly if we go back to pre-Civil Rights segregated Jim Crow America, about a system that has systematically and deliberately provided low socio-economic students with underfunded, understaffed, under-resourced schools. How could it possibly NOT involve lots of money to fix that?? I don't honestly know if the 4X figure is correct or not, but if it is, there's another explanation for why we've failed to close any gaps-- because 4X 1954 education spending strikes me as not nearly enough of an increase.

You have two children sitting at a table. Pat is regularly eating full healthful meals packed with nutrients and all the food groups. Chris is eating bread and water and an occasional cup of cereal. Somebody comes in and says, "Well, this is clearly wrong. Chris is starving, while Pat is doing well. Chris should get to eat just as well as Pat does."

The dining room chief comes in and says, "Yes, you're right. But we should only spend as much to CURMUDGUCATION: Cheap or Excellent??:

A family divided: Clan of Common Core critics differ on whether review process is working - The Hechinger Report

A family divided: Clan of Common Core critics differ on whether review process is working - The Hechinger Report:

A family divided: Clan of Common Core critics differ on whether review process is working

Split in what parents, teachers want underscored

CrOWLEY, La. — Carla and Carl Hebert, with two daughters and a granddaughter in tow, made the hour-long drive from their home in Lake Charles in October to watch a panel of Louisiana educators transform the controversial national Common Core standards into “Louisiana standards.”

Like many, the Heberts’ anger over the Common Core began with homework assignments. Carla remembers days when the whole family grew frustrated trying to help her granddaughter with the new, Common Core-aligned homework questions. “When you have two teachers and a dad who has four college degrees all struggling to help out with elementary school homework, something’s wrong,” she said.

The two teachers she’s referring to are her daughters, Shawna Dufrene and Tiffany Guidry. Dufrene, a fourth-grade teacher at Moss Bluff Elementary School in the Lake Charles suburb of Moss Bluff, was serving on the review panel. Meanwhile, Guidry, a former teacher and mother of three, sat in the audience with their parents. They had all come looking for big changes to the standards. But by the end of the long day, the Heberts were divided on whether the review was living up to its promise.

Their frustration speaks to a tension felt across the country; with nearly two dozen states revising the Common Core standards, policymakers are grappling with what role, if any, parents should have in tweaking those standards.  Can teams of educators in states like Louisiana improve standards that were years in the making? And A family divided: Clan of Common Core critics differ on whether review process is working - The Hechinger Report:

PAA Policy Brief: The Impact of Poverty, Race and Cultural Bias on Educational Opportunity* | Parents Across America

PAA Policy Brief: The Impact of Poverty, Race and Cultural Bias on Educational Opportunity* | Parents Across America:

PAA Policy Brief: The Impact of Poverty, Race and Cultural Bias on Educational Opportunity* 

The wrong war

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka No Child Left Behind or NCLB) was designed as an integral part of the War on Poverty. The law has warped into a tool to undermine and privatize public education and do away with teachers unions. This “war on public schools,” meanwhile, has failed to significantly raise student achievement or narrow achievement gaps. In fact, students made greater gains prior to NCLB. It remains to be seen if the newly- reauthorized law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, moderates NCLB’s ineffective and damaging elements.

It’s about poverty…

• For the first time in 50 years, 51% of all public school students come from low-income families.
• Low-income students – those that qualify for free or reduced lunches – consistently have the lowest scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
• Wealth and poverty are “sticky”: the rich tend to stay rich and the poor poor.

Education does NOT level the playing field

• White families are much wealthier than black and Hispanic families at every education level.
• All white families, even those at the lowest education level, have a higher median wealth than all black and Hispanic families, even those with the highest education level.
• The wealthiest high school dropouts (?)
• African-American college students are about as likely to get hired as white high school drop outs.

Other effects

• Discipline: Black students represent 16% of the US student population, but 32-42% of all students suspended or expelled, while white students make up 51% of the student population but only 31-40% of students suspended or expelled.
• Retention: African-American and Latino students are the most likely to be retained in grade, which is strongly correlated with dropping out. A recent national study of retention found a major drop in the number of students being held back, but African-American students in grades 2 through 9 were about twice as likely as white students to be retained.

*Details including data graphs and charts demonstrating each of these points can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/oplkauv.

What can we do? Recommendations for ways to address these injustices can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/pp83uoe

A downloadable pdf of this policy brief can be found here.

www.parentsacrossamerica.org info@parentsacrossamerica.org

- See more at: http://parentsacrossamerica.org/paa-policy-brief-impact-poverty-race-cultural-bias-educational-opportunity/#sthash.goT7ffVI.dpuf



PAA Policy Brief: The Impact of Poverty, Race and Cultural Bias on Educational Opportunity* | Parents Across America:

PAA has collected a set of fact sheets that vividly demonstrate the impact of poverty, race and cultural bias on educational opportunity. What these facts show is that:

• There is no “level playing field.”
• Corporate reformers and many elected officials have us fighting the wrong war – a war against public education — rather than addressing the real problems of poverty and racism. ESEA/ESSA has taken us down the wrong road
• There are programs and approaches supported by parents that address the real problems poor students and students of color face.

Read and share our policy brief.

The full fact sheets are here.

We have also presented two webinars on this topic:

March 2, 2015, with Dr. Paul Thomas

July 21, 2015, one of our PAA Week 2015 sessions

Finally here are some ideas about how to address the real challenges facing student in poverty and students of color.

- See more at: http://parentsacrossamerica.org/fact-sheets-impact-poverty-race-cultural-bias-educational-opportunity/#sthash.YtOMRkUz.dpuf